“If there’s one thing the Liberals’ have made clear over the last 10 years, it’s that you can’t trust a word they say,” Harris said. “That’s why no one believed the Environment Minister this week when he claimed he was going to scrap eco-taxes, which were first introduced by the McGuinty-Wynne Liberals five years ago.”

The Liberal government’s Waste Reduction Act, which the Environment Minister tabled in the Legislature on Thursday, will force businesses to pay a tax to the Liberals’ recycling agency, which will, then, be passed onto consumers as an eco-tax displayed on a product’s price tag.

The Liberals plan to continue imposing eco-taxes on Ontarians as a way to increase the size and power of the government’s recycling agency, Waste Diversion Ontario, which would be renamed the Waste Reduction Authority, if the government’s bill passes.

However, for five long years, this unaccountable organization authorized Liberal-created recycling cartels to impose exorbitant eco-taxes on Ontarians, including the 2,000% tire-tax hikes in April and $40 levies on big-screen TVs in May this year.

“This government agency has broken the trust of Ontarians time and again and should not be rewarded with more power and a bigger multi-million-dollar budget funded through eco-taxes,” Harris said. “When an employee has failed to perform his duties, you don’t hand him a promotion and give him a raise. You hand him his pink slip and show him the door.”

In November last year, the Ontario PC Party presented a better way forward to protect our environment, lower costs for businesses and to treat recyclable materials – not as waste – but as valuable resources that we should recover and recycle into new products.

“The Ontario PC Party would scrap eco-taxes, get rid of Liberal recycling cartels and put the province’s toothless waste diversion watchdog out of its misery,” Harris said. “Under our plan, government would set measurable and achievable recycling targets, establish environmental standards and measure outcomes. That’s it.”